The official blog of the Campaign for the American Reader, an independent initiative to encourage more readers to read more books.

Saturday, September 05, 2009

David Rabe's best books

David Rabe is the award-winning author of the Tony Award-nominated plays Streamers, Hurlyburly, and Sticks and Bones, which won the award. His novel Dinosaurs on the Roof and his recent plays The Black Monk and The Dog Problem have just been released in paperback.

For The Week magazine he named his best books. One title on the list:

Song of Napalm: Poems by Bruce Weigl (Atlantic Monthly, $11).

Weigl served with the 1st Air Cavalry in Vietnam. Whether he writes of events on the ground, or in the haunted space of aftermath he carried with him, his poems here and in What Saves Us convey a fierce, visceral immediacy that is strangely meditative.